In my review of All About Steve last week, I asked why 45-year-old Sandra Bullock was still making the kind of girly rom-coms she made in her 20s and 30s. Love them or hate them, Bullock now produces them, so she casts herself in versions of the same role she made her name on.
But in doing so, she's avoided the old Hollywood curse of being discarded once she turned the dreaded 40. The likes of Sharon Stone, Meg Ryan, Kim Basinger and countless once-big actresses weren't so lucky.
Now, with her latest horror-thriller Case 39, I wonder about the fate of former Oscar-winner Renee Zellweger, who hasn't had a hit since her 2005 sequel to Bridget Jones's Diary.
Heck, she's struggled to even lead a movie in the past five years, with Appaloosa and My One and Only suffering the ignominy of going straight to video.
And yes, she just turned the age that shall not be named.
Case 39 won't help her. It's a demonic child chiller in the tradition of The Omen or the recent Orphan, where a seemingly innocent tyke does terrible deeds. And while Zellweger gives a compelling, convincing performance, the script has a raging case of cliche-itis.
It begins well enough. Emily (Zellweger) is a hard-working child social worker who thinks she's seen it all until she gets case 39. A middle-class mum and dad, apparently, are quietly trying to kill their 10-year-old daughter. Charming.
Though bound by red tape, Emily catches them in the act of shoving little Lillith (Jodelle Ferland) into an oven, and has them locked up. The parents insist the girl must be "sent back to hell", so Emily takes her home and signs up as her foster mother.
When Lillith becomes an increasingly spooky little sprocket, and people start dying around her, Emily starts to think the parents might, in fact, be right.
The cool thing about Case 39 is the way it makes out that Lillith is an innocent victim before she switches to killer kid. But it's obvious from the outset she's not all she seems to be. She's quiet, friendless, has long black hair and a deadly stare. And her name is Lillith, for heaven's sake, which must be the spookiest name anyone could give a child.
There's only one real "wow" moment here, where the girl asks her kindly shrink (a miscast Bradley Cooper, from The Hangover) his greatest fear. Next thing Cooper knows, hornets are buzzing out of his mouth, nose, eyes and ears. That's got to sting!
A detective (Ian McShane) gets a similar fate when he tries to help. But in the end, of course, it's up to Zellweger's feeble Emily to toughen up and take on the little tyrant. And that's when it's on for young and old.
Young Ferland makes a memorably malevolent little monster, and Zellweger does her best with the routine material. But, like her last few films, I suspect Case 39 was a whisker away from going straight-to-video shelf hell.
Perhaps that's where they should have sent Lillith all along.
- FILM *
Case 39 (MA) **
Renee Zellweger, Bradley Cooper
Director: Christian Alvart
Review: Shannon Harvey
